"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement

Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

When Ray
Bradbury was twelve years old, he went to a carnival and encountered Mr.
Electrico, a performer who sat in an electric chair with current running
through him so that his hair stood up and an electrical sword he held would
glow. Touching the sword to the young
Bradbury’s head, Mr. Electrico exclaimed: “Live forever!” Alas, Mr. Electrico’s command has gone
unheeded, for Bradbury died last Tuesday at 91 -- long-lived, to be sure, but
well short of forever.

Bradbury’s
work has always meant a lot to me. He
was not a hard SF
writer, but serious science fiction need not always be about accurately tracing
the implications of current scientific theory and knowledge. There is also a humanistic side to the genre,
which includes the exploration of the unique perspective its unusual situations
open up on the nature and motivations of human beings. At that Bradbury excelled. And of course, he wrote beautifully and
imaginatively.

Indeed, imagination
prevailed over intellect (as an Aristotelian might put it) in the sense that
Bradbury was not a systematic thinker. On
the other hand, he was refreshingly resistant to the “smelly little orthodoxies”
that prevail in literary circles. Though
more or less a mushy libertarian on what we euphemistically call the “social
issues,” Bradbury was in other respects quite conservative. Recently I was reading Sam Weller’s Listen
to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, wherein Bradbury says the
following:

Somebody somewhere along the line had
the give the taxes back to the people. Roosevelt
never did it, Hoover never did it. They
could have cured the Depression in 1932 when my father was out of work for ten
years. My father suffered. They should have given him back his tax
money. Nobody thought of that, and
nobody did anything. Kennedy was the
first to experiment with it. The year
before he died, there were a few experiments with giving the taxes back, but
there was never the chance to really experiment fully, and he died. So it was never mentioned again until Reagan
came along and cut the taxes, and then we began to get jobs. When he came into office, there were millions
of people unemployed. He lowered taxes
all over the United States and created millions of jobs.

About the
recent economic crisis, Bradbury said:

We made a lot of mistakes with credit
cards, we made a lot of mistakes with mortgages… A lot of people are stupid. They didn’t pay attention to their
expenses. They had too many credit cards,
they spent money without knowing it.

And about
the Cold War and the Iraq war:

[Reagan] was one of the best
presidents of the last century… [H]e was the first person to have the courage
to challenge the Russians to tear down the wall. Reagan and Pope John Paul II ended the Cold War…

[W]hen President Reagan stood his
ground over nuclear disarmament against Gorbachev in Reykjavik, Iceland, it
scared Russia. Gorbachev told me this
when I had lunch with him, that Reagan was our best president. He forced Russia to either spend billions of
dollars they didn’t have to keep up the Cold War, or to reconsider negotiating
peace…

Had we overthrown Hussein during the
first Gulf War, we wouldn’t be in Iraq today.
We blame Bush Two for the war in Iraq, but that was his father’s
fault. But we don’t pay enough attention
to the fact that we got rid of a dictator and they have had an election in
Iraq. That’s a good thing.

On matters
of religion Bradbury tended toward a vague spirituality. But while he thought there was little we
could know for sure where theology is concerned, he was equally disinclined to
accept the dogmas of scientism:

I’m a delicatessen religionist… “Well,
how can you believe in Darwin, Lamarck, and Genesis?” I say, “Because nothing is proven.” None of it.
So therefore why not have a delicatessen in your head? I’ll take some of these ideas, some of those
and some of that.

Like I said,
not a systematic thinker. But there was
a further aspect to his character that made him an especially attractive
personality, and something that is a key part of (though of course by no means
the whole of) true religion and true conservatism. As Weller puts it, “Ray lives each day with
immense gratitude.” Not optimism --
though Bradbury certainly had that -- but an attitude of thankfulness for all
the good there is in creation. Many a modern intellectual is constantly pissed off at the world, always on the lookout
for something new about which to bitch and moan. Not Bradbury.
Asked whether it was fame that motivated him to become a writer,
Bradbury answered: “Love motivated me.
Love is the answer to everything.
I was in love with life.”

4 comments:

My fondest memory of Ray Bradbury was seeing an interview with him. The interviewer was talking about Fahrenheit, and sort of leading him in the direction of giving some social commentary on (this was a bigger issue at the time) censorship on TV, etc. I suspect the interviewer may have thought Bradbury would be incensed at the very idea of there being standards like that, etc. Instead...

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.